The eclipse and re-emergence of the antipsychiatry movement

Brief introductory post outlining what antipsychiatry is and the need for its renewal.

As part of their birthday celebrations Libcom decided to expand their blog section, so I decided I’d put my foot forward to do a bit of writing on mental health. While I know Ramona already writes on mental health, I figure it can’t hurt to have someone else contributing to promote the complexity of mental distress within the anarchist community. As such, I’m going to try not to let this blog become too theory-heavy or to use language that might alienate people who aren’t comfortable with the philosophy of mental health. At times this will mean sacrificing conceptual complexity for clarity of communication. I’ll be happy to address any theoretical points in discussion in the comments section. At the outset I should also disclose that I am a trained mental health nurse about to start working in the substance misuse field, in case people feel that this might be an important blinder to how I see thing. For now, I want to begin by emphasising why I want to write about mental health on an anarchist site at all.

There are countless analyses and arguments about the effects of capital and the state on human beings, the environment, and their ecological interdependence. They often focus on state power, authoritarianism, and the organisation of work, economic inequality and moral injustice. Too infrequently do we find considered and nuanced understandings of the relationship between the state, capitalism and mental distress. Often, it appears in a list of other negative consequences of life under late capitalism as a sort of footnote or, even more commonly, statistics on suicide rates will be deployed to bolster arguments about the human cost of capital. Those who seek to make the links and establish the mechanisms of the psychic fall-out of capitalism are rarely widely read and seem too often to be considered “anti-psychiatric” throwbacks to an earlier historical period. The argument is that we’ve matured beyond the point of being anti-psychiatric, and perhaps we have. Yet that doesn’t mean that the project and legacy of anti-psychiatry is any less important than it was at its height. Anti-psychiatry remains relevant for two reasons: it helped to establish contemporary psychiatric practice, and its critique remains unfinished.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s a slew of psychiatrists and militant intellectuals began to critique the psychiatric establishment on the basis that its treatments were doing patients far more harm than good. The term itself was coined by the South African Marxist psychiatrist David Cooper. It was Cooper who helped put together the famous Congress on the Dialectic of Liberation that brought together Herbert Marcuse, RD Laing, Paul Goodman and Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers. Radical credentials verified, anti-psychiatry’s other celebrities included the aforementioned Laing but also figures as varied as American libertarian Thomas Szasz, French thinker Michel Foucault, and Italian psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. What united these diverse figures was their contention that psychiatry amounted to a form of violence and held that rather than seeking to heal or to cure the “therapeutic” function of psychiatry was really a thinly-veiled mode of social control.

To risk obliterating the very marked differences between some of these figures, we can summarise a general anti-psychiatric outlook or attitude. First, it rejected the idea that psychiatric illness was an exclusively biological phenomenon; it rejected the idea that psychiatric diagnoses were normatively neutral descriptions of illness states; it often rejected the use of neuroleptic medication; it saw the asylum/hospital/clinic as establishing a physical apartheid of the mad and the sane; it saw psychiatry as trying to regulate the behaviour and psychic life of whole populations along the lines of that apartheid through processes of “normalisation”; in doing so psychiatry was seen as depriving people of liberty and autonomy on spurious grounds; psychiatry’s history was revealed as one of constant brutality and violence grounded in pseudo-scientific discourses, infamously including the idea that homosexuality was a mental illness up until DSM-III was published in 1980. Specific critiques also outlined how psychiatric discourse actively constituted specific passive subjectivities (Foucault) or outlined how the psychiatric ward was more like a concentration camp than a genuinely therapeutic environment (Goffman). Crucial to almost all of these critiques was the notion that psychiatry is a pseudo-science.

These critiques all remain true today, so why haven’t we seen the emergence of an emancipatory and genuinely therapeutic approach to care for those suffering from mental distress? In part, I would say this is because the anti-psychiatric critiques- written off by the orthodox psychiatry of the day- was fully assimilated into the very structure of psychiatry itself. That is to say, the radicalism of the anti-psychiatrists was recuperated by the system it was attacking. This can be seen in the fact that psychiatry now prides itself on its emphasis on deinstitutionalisation and community care, its rhetorical embrace of the recovery movement, and its tokenistic inclusion of “service-users” into its hierarchy.

The attack on psychiatry’s pseudo-scientific nature led to the aggressive adoption of the biological model of mental illness at the same time that training programmes for psychiatrists, nurses and other service-workers began to talk about a “biopsychosocial model”- talk that has yet to manifest in any real practical upheavals of psychiatric care.

Alongside this is the adoption as orthodoxy of one of RD Laing’s most controversial ideas. In the 1970s Laing conducted studies on the language patterns and communicative interactions of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and their families. His startling conclusion was that these linguistic interactions could actually make the schizophrenic experience worse, causing relapses into psychoses and prolonging their frequency and duration (chronicity). At the time, Laing was accused of blaming families for causing schizophrenia and was cemented as a dangerous and callous man. However, that very same idea has been integrated into the heart of “evidence-based” psychiatry in the form of the concept “high-expressed emotion”. One of the most radical challenges to biopsychiatry was dismissed, destroyed and then recuperated. In practice this has cashed out in terms of some people being offered systems family therapy, but the radical idea that experience has a social rather than purely biological basis has been dropped.

None of which is to claim that the experience of mental distress isn’t biologically mediated. We are bodies and our experience is embodied- there is no “mind” floating independently of our physiology. At the same time though, psychiatry remains unwilling to accept that our embodiment exists in complex ecological relationships that includes our sociality.

Similarly, none of this is to claim that the original critiques of the anti-psychiatrists were unproblematic. For instance, Szasz’s critique was motivated by his right-wing libertarian philosophy and included the desire to see people stand trial for acts they committed while experiencing distress, acts they may not otherwise have performed.

Foucault’s position in some of his work seems to embrace a kind of romanticism of mental distress, while Laing expressed some dubious ideas about “schizophrenia” as a shamanic journey of self-discovery. Many of the anti-psychiatrists also rejected the benefits of therapy and medication as if these were evil in-itself, in a move that would remind many anarchists of primitivism’s rejection of technology.

Too few of those involved in the original anti-psychiatry movement were revolutionaries, most of them being radicals or hyper-liberals who can offer us a lot of helpful work but themselves didn’t situate that work as part of the supersession of capitalism and the state (Guattari is the only one that really seems to have had this as a goal and he is, ironically, the one anti-psychiatrist most often neglected from histories of the "movement").

As we begin to see a raft of reports on increasing suicide rates, depression, anxiety and eating disorders, along with the related rise in prescriptions for psychiatric medications, and more and more fears about the “pathologisation of everyday life”, I think it is time for anarchists to become more involved in the return to anti-psychiatry. Clinical psychologist Richard Bentall has (not unproblematically) heralded the need for a new ‘rational anti-psychiatry’ while people like Pat Bracken are spear heading a ‘critical psychiatry’. Yet without linking this to thorough analyses of the relationship of mental health and psychiatry to corrosive powers of capitalism and the state such a renewed anti-psychiatry is pointless. The critique has been swallowed whole by the system and turned into the justification for today’s aggressive colonisation of our lives by that very system.

It seems to me that the “mentally ill” have always been among those subjects to be proletarianised. Today, this proletarianisation has always gone hand in hand with social exclusion, impoverishment and the social death that economic proletarians face. In conditions such as our own, these two versions of proletarianisation are united into a common face.

If the original anti-psychiatry helped to shape the current form of psychiatry then it is clear it can’t simply be reactivated, but it is also clear that it must be repeated in a new way to challenge its violence and its psycho-political management of populations. Part of the purpose of this blog will be to discuss this renewed critical stance to psychiatry and to do so from an anarcho-communist perspective.

Initially, I will be posting critical short introductions to key figures, events and ideas from antipsychiatry's history and its afterlives. I aim to do this with a fairly regular schedule, as well as submitting sporadic posts in response to current events that touch on relevant issues. I’d welcome feedback and any requests for topics to be covered.

In this context, alienation no longer means the loss of an allegedly human authenticity, as it did in the old humanist or idealist sense. Here, alienation means a psychopathological state, a psychological form of suffering, that has its roots in a new escalation of psychological exploitation.

I think there may be another facet of anti-psychiatry of interest, that being the movement against forced and coercive psychiatry. This particular prong of attack, while not explicitly political in itself, has been successful enough to be included in United Nation reports on torture, inhumane and degrading treatment. A reasonable amount of information on this movement, including links to original UN reports, can be read here.

Something on cognitive behavioural therapy would be nice, since that seems to be the dominant psychotherapy at the moment (I have a couple of books by Aaron T Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy). (I've also been reading some stuff about cognitive theory recently, but didn't get very far and had to put that aside for the moment for something else. I'm not in any way involved with psychotherapy, just interested.)

Also, systemic therapy looks interesting, but I don't know much about it (from wiki: "Systemic therapy is a form of psychotherapy which seeks to address people not on individual level, as had been the focus of earlier forms of therapy, but as people in relationship, dealing with the interactions of groups and their interactional patterns and dynamics.") [ETA: which you briefly mentioned above! Sorry, I read the blog last night, and forgot about that.]

Yeah thanks for this, I'm looking forward to future installments. Anti-psychiatry is one of those things I'm kinda aware of via secondary sources, but i've never really read any directly. I think this stuff is really important as mental ill-health is so widespread today.

In fact, often one of the barriers to collective organisation at work is the fact just surviving work without burning out or breaking down is a challenge. While organising could perhaps change that in the medium term, in the immediate term it's more thinking about work when you just want to hit the sofa and/or the bottle and zone out.

The social aspect of the critique seems really important. Even if medical professionals are schooled in critical, social theory, their options are limited. Like, a sympathetic GP can give you a 'fit note' that signs you off with stress, but your employer can still sack you, and ATOS will still strip you of benefits for not being disabled enough. So even when e.g. work is the direct cause of distress, people still need to work, so it's likely they'll end up prescribing meds to allow people to function.

When I was in that position I was basically a zombie. The GP recommended time off, but they sacked the previous people off with stress as 'not team players'. They recommended CBT (which has its own problems, especially as work stress is not irrational), but i'd had to fake a sports injury to get an appointment cos time off wasn't really allowed (hence the stress), and it was only available in work hours. So they stuck me on meds to regulate mood and help me sleep, not cos they had a reductive bio/neuro model of mental health (afaik), but cos that's all that was possible given the structural constraints.

Tech developments look set to exagerate this pattern, e.g. the Guardian reports that neural implants look set to supplant SSRIs as the reductionist intervention of choice for churning out functional worker-zombies. Obviously, not all mental distress is directly related to work in that way, but that just makes social critique more important imho.

The graffiti in the embedded image is from the SPK. I'm planning to include something on them, esp. because their radicalisation of the concept of illness. There is going to be more covered than I mentioned...I'm planning on this being a long-term project.

vajramrita wrote:

I think there may be another facet of anti-psychiatry of interest, that being the movement against forced and coercive psychiatry.

I'm going to include stuff on that. In fact, it's really a major thread running through most of anti-psychiatry, post-psychiatry and critical psychiatry/psychology.

Omen wrote:

Something on cognitive behavioural therapy would be nice

I plan to write on that, too...including the newer third wave versions of CBT that incorporate criticisms of Beck's model (DBT; ACT; CBT-mindfulness).

It seems like it might be a good idea to write intros to figures, ideas, events, movements and forms of therapy with separate titles (idea, my next post would be called Figures from Antipsychiatry: Thomas Szasz; a future one could be called Interventions: CBT; and those main titles would be kept w/ different subheadings).

Omen wrote:

systemic therapy looks interesting,

I'll go more into it, yeh. It's going to come up when I write about Laing. Systems Family Therapy has become very popular in Scotland at the moment. Systems theory is fascinating (esp, Luhmann).

Joseph Kay wrote:

In fact, often one of the barriers to collective organisation at work is the fact just surviving work without burning out or breaking down is a challenge. While organising could perhaps change that in the medium term, in the immediate term it's more thinking about work when you just want to hit the sofa and/or the bottle and zone out.

I'm quite keen on developing a "political therapeutics"; a kind of theory of a politicised therapy that would be a making therapeutic of political action, rather than reducing politics to a therapeutic moment (for example, as Franco Berardi does). Part of my own anti-psychiatry comes from the idea that mental distress, exhaustion, depression, anxiety seem generated and/or used to keep the working class from organising itself, whilst also pitting latent proletarians ("the middle class") against the working class- psychotherapy is usually a middle class phenomena, while psychiatric patients in hospitals are almost always working class.

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So even when e.g. work is the direct cause of distress, people still need to work, so it's likely they'll end up prescribing meds to allow people to function.

I'll be going into the research on medication at some point, much of which seems to show it as effective only ever as a short term measure- with long term use producing all kinds of negative effects up to and including the symptoms they're meant to treat and mortality (this is esp. so with neuroleptics).

As far as I can see, and I'll try to argue this, medication is used in exactly this way in a number of cases. Whether it is people intentions or not- as you say, there are always sympathetic professionals- is irrelevant; the systemic effect is a kind of "psychopolitical" management of workers.

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"Joseph Kay"]not cos they had a reductive bio/neuro model of mental health (afaik), but cos that's all that was possible given the structural constraints.

Again, whether or not individuals are more or less reductionist almost doesn't matter. The structure of psychiatry is reductionist and this definitely place limits on possible treatments and therapies. I'll be addressing this point over and over again I think, possibly to the point of boredom.

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Tech developments look set to exagerate this pattern,

Yep. As neurology and applied neuroscience advance we get closer and closer to the possibility of a neurototalitarianism. I'm aware this could be seen as scare mongering but I really want to emphasise that its a possibility, I'm not suggesting for a moment it's likely and still less necessary. On that point, this is a very interesting blog post.

Thanks for all the comments and interest, always helps to keep a body going.

I am very pleased that someone else has brought this up, I have been trying to get people in my local afed group to do stuff around mental health for the last year (with not much luck!) most anarchists seem to hate psychiatry so much that they won't even talk about it!

It would be good if anarchists could target psychology as a whole and not just focus on mental health; the number of critical psychologists are increasing and their views are so similar to that of anarchists, all they lack is the understanding of anarchism and activism! I am currently studying psychology and I am planning of doing my research on anarchism and psychology, mainly as a way to get lecturers and students talking about anarchism!

check out Dennis Fox an American psychologist who is trying to get anarchism more involved in psychology.

check out Dennis Fox an American psychologist who is trying to get anarchism more involved in psychology.

Dennis Fox is a good source, and I agree that there is convergence with anarchism and critical psychology...on this there is also the work of David Smail. He is perhaps more Marxian than avowedly anarchist but his work (and the manifesto from the group he works with) is brilliant.

Elsewhere I've been developing a theory of bodies, and Smail is particularly good for this too.

I was involved peripherally with an anti psychiatry group in Toronto (Canada) in the late 70's early 80's...put out a mag, Phoenix Rising, some of whose issues are available
here( http://www.psychiatricsurvivorarchives.com/books.html )...also they ran a second hand shop called the Mad Market... I've had varied experience with psychiatrists & therapists over the years
....with the left at that time in Toronto most just avoided the issue(s) ....not feeling particularly comfortable around the "crazy" it seemed...the ones who had a passing familiarity with the anti psychiatric literature would go around telling all and sundry to ditch their meds, usually with unfortunate consequences....some of us do need chemical help once in awhile....anyway.. ...I look forward to further postings...check out the mag referenced above for some thoughts by the mad about dealing with the mental health profession..

Great start on something urgently needed; future plans look even better. The image at the top led me to hope that that the SPK (who still exist) would show up at some point. Looking forward to that part in particular and also to any thoughts you might have on the recent ascendancy of neuro-everything: eg. the public squabble between the DSM editors and their neuropsych critics, but also in a broader social sense, eg. 'neuroeconomics'* and general neo-Lombrosianism in sociology, 'criminal justice', etc.
(Thanks also to commenters above for pointing out stuff I was unaware of despite longstanding obsession with all of this.)

*For anyone wise enough to have avoided the smarmy tract, Nobel-prize tag (or Nudge?) team Akerlof & Shiller assert in their 'Animal Spirits' that 'brain imaging' proves that we all love inflicting punishment.

One other thing I think could be useful to cover at some point would be Oppositional Defiance Disorder - when I was travelling around the US a few years ago I met quite a few young anarchists who were diagnosed with this as kids, for no other reason than that they disliked arbitrary authority.

Thanks for putting more info about what you plan to do with the blog, it sounds really exciting. And TBH it looks like it could make a good book (or e-book at least!) eventually - Anti-Psychiatry for Dummies or something of that ilk…

I'll definitely be covering the neuro-everything phenomena. I'm fairly interested in some of the developments in neurology but I definitely think that orthodox psychiatry is fetishising it. The 90s had been called "the decade of the brain' but its only now that the applied elements are coming into their own. One of my biggest targets is the eliminativist materialism of people like the Churchlands- brilliantly set into fiction by RS Bakker in Neuropath.

In particular, I will (at some point) be looking at how charges of pseudo-science against psychiatry from the 1940 up to the 1980s really helped the biopsychiatrists to gain dominance. Relating that to now, we could argue a similar process is underway with the emergence of a neuropsychiatric consensus.

Steven,

I will be looking at contentious diagnoses and the nature of diagnosis itself (I hope people will feel in a more nuanced way that diagnoses=bad or not real). Both oppositional disorder, adjustment disorder and intermittent explosive disorder will be on my horizon for that.

At the moment its beginning to look like there is a lot to explore, and pacing could be an issue. I'll also be doing additional research as there are some important aspects that I don't know too much about, such as Basaglia- none of whom's work appears in English (except one short text from early in his career). Basaglia was one of those responsible for the abolition of asylums in Italy and founded the democratic psychiatry movement there, so it'd be a shame not to get something up on his work.

I’m very excited about this blog and want to put a few requests in early and observations that you’ve almost certainly thought of anyway.

sometimes explode wrote:

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One of my biggest targets is the eliminativist materialism of people like the Churchlands- brilliantly set into fiction by RS Bakker in Neuropath...

None of which is to claim that the experience of mental distress isn’t biologically mediated. We are bodies and our experience is embodied- there is no “mind” floating independently of our physiology. At the same time though, psychiatry remains unwilling to accept that our embodiment exists in complex ecological relationships that includes our sociality...

Elsewhere I've been developing a theory of bodies, and Smail is particularly good for this too.

This makes me hopeful that you will find a place to discuss the type of materialism which will frame your outlook or form part of its core presuppositions. I’m interested in how you reconcile the same old paradox of one reality existing in two places, internally in the brain and simultaneously in the ‘outer’ world. I’ve never really understood how anyone can take seriously the hypothesis that the experiences we have of events in the world, including of our own bodies, are all occurring as representations in our brains or as neural correlates or states or whatever the current buzzword is. If asked to point to the keyboard I’m writing this on I would not point at my head. As I type this it seems to me that I’m feeling the keyboard in my fingers and that for the most part my direct experience or consciousness of the keyboard is occurring in my fingers, not in my head. When I see the stars it never occurs to me that my skull exists beyond them and that everything else I have ever experienced is a miniature perceptual replica within my unknowable real head. If I did have this sensation I’d think someone had slipped something interesting into the Jamesons.

Even the simplest perceptual mechanisms of standard materialisms make absolutely no sense. Kepler’s intromission theory of vision explains everything about it except how we actually perceive the world: the lenses in both of the eyes produce small upside down and left-to-right images in both of the retinas, but we don’t see anything like these two separate things when we look at an object. The rays reflecting from a mirror seem to come from a point behind the mirror because the eye/brain ‘imagines’ that the rays intersect when produced backwards. Come again? How does it do this imagining and how does it ‘produce the rays backwards’? In what way can the visual cortex be said to possess sight? How powerful must it be to follow certain versions of neuroscience in trying to squeeze perception into some passive virtual reality display inside our computer-brains if in the process we can’t even account for how we see stuff, let alone explain all our other conscious experiences? Our perceptions seem much more integrated with our behaviours than this fantasy suggests.

And finally, after such an extended period of research on the molecular details of nerve cells and their connections, the synapses, there is a large body of evidence that habituation, one of the most fundamental types of memory, occurs in single celled organisms which possess no synapses. And as has been repeatedly demonstrated, despite the almost complete dissolving of the caterpillar’s nervous system in metamorphosis, the moth remembers everything the caterpillar learned. How does this work, materially? There is also a huge body of evidence that learned habits are retained after the associated areas of the brain are destroyed. Is there any corresponding evidence that brains store memories as permanent molecular traces in the manner of computers? If so, how does mine manage to remember my partner’s birthday given the fact that with the exception of DNA all the molecules in our bodies have a turnover rate of at most a few months? Is her birthday part of my genetic makeup, as Chomsky might have it? How do the molecular retrieval systems recognise these memories in the first place in order to retrieve them? If a systems approach involving millions of nerve cells responding to electromagnetic fields in the brain gives a better description, what for example does it mean materially that memories are stored in a distributed manner like the interference patterns of a hologram? And if the brain is really where it’s at, how does the synapse or connections model explain the functioning of the brain of the man who received a first-class honours degree in mathematics from Sheffield University who’d had hydrocephalus as a child which had left him with almost no brain at all and whose skull was lined with a thin layer of brain cells about a millimetre thick, a few percent normal brain size, the rest being filled with fluid?

Particularly on account of the entry of the computer metaphor into this domain of knowledge I can’t escape the feeling that neuroscience is just a load of old rubbish churned up in capital’s unending drive to control and pacify bodies for work. It gives me the heebiejeebies

Really interesting reply. I've been working on answers to these questions on other blogs and in a few papers. First though, I'd say that this might not be the place to concentrate on answering thee questions. The intention here is to be as accessible as possible and these concerns are ones where I can't help but become less than that..not least because we suddenly need to include neurophenomenology, E4A cognitive science, and so on.

As an initial response, I completely reject either materialist reductionism or any of the varieties of Cartesian dualism that constantly return. Psychiatry is riddled with such dualism, takes it as its foundational decision (there might be a path for a non-psychiatry here in the same way that Laurelle's work on non-(standard) philosophy has developed.

Ontologically, I begin from the Stoics. Their corporealist physics offers the basis for a non-reductive way to talk about bodies as that which exists that doesn't reject incorporeal things (such as mind) without reifying them or boiling one into the other. From their the obvious move is through Deleuze in his treatment of corporeals as actuals and incorporeals as virtualities..this language and ontology helps to clarify things but I prefer to retain the Stoic terms simply because of their emphasis on the embodiedness of all existing entities. This emphasis of then proceeds through a strange mixture of phenomenology (specifcially, Merleau-Ponty) onticology/machine-oriented ontology, the work of Stacey Alaimo and- when it comes to humans- a little of Ernest Becker and Otto Rank's corporeal-existential psychoanalysis. These are also set into machinic connection with the concepts of Umwelt, as well as choreographic concepts of autopoesis and/or metabolic conjunctions of specific bodies with other bodies and their environments in order to trace how these umwelts emerge. The question of the umwelt is grounded empirically in the work of extended, embodied, affective cognition and the neurophenomenology of dynamic action-perception systems.

All of this comes down to a particular body being a kind of ensemble of other bodies, making up an ensemble that is a larger body, so that "body" is to be understood as an assemblage. This assemblage (a la Delanda, but not quite) is coupled with other bodies and the world in its capacity to act, to have actions and to limit the actions of others. For bodies that have perceptual systems this is can be augmented to a theory close to the JJ Gibson theory of affordances: what shows up in a body's perceptual system isn't surfaces and lines, colours and sound, textures and scents, but only those ones that are significantly important to increasing or diminishing that bodies capacity to act (this is also linked to a theory of post-nihilist praxis). Eventually, I return both to the Stoics and to Merleau-Ponty in their respective ideas of weave and flesh.

This need mighty unpacking but this isn't really the place for it, or at least not yet. The question of memory might be along the lines of memory existing as an incorporeal subsistence or virtual capacity of the body that operates as an immanent organisational "logos" in specific neural circuits, communicating with wider cns systems and (by extension) the environment. Memory isn't "in" the brain in that sense but is a circulating set of rules for material morphology. Alzheimer's disease, that dementia that involves slow morphological changes, would destroy the memories not by deleting them but because it reorganises the materiality of brain structures; this renders the operation of the perceptual-action system of the human being as different, new priorities emerge while other are displaced and this reinforces the redistribution of memory. In this kind of picture, its not that memory is in your brain or DNA but that it would necessarily be distributed across your fleshly systems and the world that shows up for your body's material hermeneutics of its environment.

The computer metaphor is just a bit of nonsense. Computers compute + my brain computes= therefore my brain is a computer. This misses the onto-specificity of this particular brain as compared to that one, let alone the onto-specificity of this brain compared to that computer.

A lot of this work that I'm doing with others elsewhere relies on neuroscience. I don't think we can just reject it. The issue is to recognise that even within neuroscience there is diversity of research programmes, commitments and so on. For instance, I've conducted some research into the possibility that schizophrenia is a disorder of embodiment (a kind of disruption in one's being one's own body; from this you get breakdown/slippage in self-other distinction; you get muscular coordination problems; you get strange interioception; in other words, the basis of a lot of schizophrenic symptoms seems to be related to a disruption in auto-affection that further disrupts body-environment action-perception couplings). To do this research, I read a lot of neuroscience...almost all of it confirming that schizophrenia isn't a brain disease or a "mental" disorder, if we're taking the "mental" for the Cartesian res cogitans.

Anyway, this is a pretty messy reply and probably a less than satisfying one...so I'll draw it to a close here.

On the contrary it will keep me reading for a month. I haven't read the Stoics for ages. You probably know it but Alva Noë's Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness is a great read.

Enjoyed this article. Found it to be a clear and strong overview and look forward to any others that come of it. A couple of thoughts though occurred to me reading it.

My first thought comes with your occassional use of the term 'mental health' which is a little more suspect than your other term 'mental distress'. 'Mental health' for instance implies 'mental illness' and a binary separation between valid and invalid existences. The question of what constitutes a mental illness is therefore a question of authority and aquiescence to definitions.

A second thought concerns the idea of an emboded mind which - like anything if you take Foucault seriously - must also have its historical geneology. It seems to me that any contemporary certainty that the mind is embodied is itself the product of a questionable order of things. The idea of 'mental illness' as a chemical problem disconnects us from the idea that it might be a spiritual problem and makes supersitious witches of any approach to mind that proposes alternatives to a physical machine. At its extreme you see the kinds of collision that the West has say with Congolese exorcisms.

As a third remark, I'd say the idea that 'mental distress' can't be romantic has its place in power insofar as it places a taboo on saying 'mental distress can be romantic'. What are the reasons and effects of creating this taboo? I reckon there is a whole load of scope in this assumption to question how power is working. A mental distress without romance is to some extent more romantic due to that very lack of any positive value. At the same time, if we do say it has no romance, then we are also saying it has no use which sees a greater pressure for its regulation/annihilation. There are good reasons for sufferers to take back their sufferings in a positive light.

Finally, I also wonder about the notion of 'anti-psychaitry' given that psychiatry seems today to be a tool more than a well defined power-sign. The sign of psychiatry has many users now - nurses, judges, politicinas, CBT marketeers, neuroscientists, psychoanalysts, Carl Rogerite humanists etc. The sign can as likely undermine the legal process and a person's 'capacity' as it can be used in terms of social control and dispossession from certain forms of behaviour. Capitalism seems to move us toward ever more fluid notions and ever more diffusse experiences of power rather than precisely concentrating them. This may well have been anti-psychiatry's original meaning - that it made psychiatry more fluid and prepared it for atomised communicaiton/interpretation. By this measure, isn't anti-psychiatry obsolete and isn't it more prudent to think in terms of subverting its various uses?

Or maybe a genuine anti-capitalism requires greater conceptual concentration - requires we give psychiatry and more precise meaning. Genuine anti-capitalism probably requires greater concentrations of power and meaning, not their diffusion.

As a third remark, I'd say the idea that 'mental distress' can't be romantic has its place in power insofar as it places a taboo on saying 'mental distress can be romantic'. What are the reasons and effects of creating this taboo? I reckon there is a whole load of scope in this assumption to question how power is working. A mental distress without romance is to some extent more romantic due to that very lack of any positive value. At the same time, if we do say it has no romance, then we are also saying it has no use which sees a greater pressure for its regulation/annihilation. There are good reasons for sufferers to take back their sufferings in a positive light.

'This mad project is so overwhelming that its originator can’t even tell that they’ve subsumed themselves within its matrix. We’re dealing with a truly unreliable narrator here, not one that misleads us about the course of events (the narrator is compulsive, they do have poor insight), but one whose entire conceptual framework is radically off-kilter. As such, the entire story is a portrait of the narrator’s own particular madness. With this realization, DSM-5 starts to enter the realm of the properly dystopian.'

Thinking Allowed podcast had also did a bit on anti-psychiatry a year or two ago. It's a while since I listened but I remember it being treated like a a quaint idea; not entirely damningl nor a ringing endorsement.

Hi, just to echo the poster above who suggested you put together a reading list to accompany this blog.

I think that would be really useful. Something in the style of one of the libcom reading guides (http://libcom.org/library/libcomorg-reading-guide) would be great, ideally a general mental health of psychiatry reading list - you could also include some of the articles you write in this list as introductions to different topics.

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